


Gulliver's Travels

by b_interesting



Category: Original Work
Genre: Belonging, Free Verse, Home, Identity, Poetry, reputation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-06-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 14:15:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b_interesting/pseuds/b_interesting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short, free-verse poem.</p>
<p>"It's not where you come from, it's where you go from there" </p>
<p>I think reputation is everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gulliver's Travels

I spend countless hours walking the same route  
through a town I’ve always lived in  
and I often get asked a question I absolutely despise:  
‘Why?’  
‘Why don’t you just join a gym?’  
‘Why don’t you buy a car?’  
‘Why not shake it up a bit?’  
As if walking the same route  
through a town I’ve always lived in  
isn’t as shaky as the hand of a man signing his own death warrant.

Because there’s something indescribable  
about being at the center of a passing world,  
watching cars drive by and houses age  
and people grow into themselves.  
My friends have joked that they’re my ‘travels’,  
that I’m a Gulliver in a land of tiny people  
but that romanticism of ‘know all, be all’ is so overrated  
that I wanna smash the whole damn city and set fire to the king. 

Because sometimes knowing what goes on in an ill-explored town  
is enough reason as to the lack of exploration.  
When you come from a place labelled as a terrorist hell-hole  
and go searching to find a spark of goodness  
but instead find destruction and clichés in the form of  
thugs and anti-social teenagers,  
seeing reckless drivers with five phones and no headlights  
make a line straight for the pavement,  
walking by empty condom wrappers in alleyways  
and streets knee deep in trash with empty bins.  
As I get told to fuck off by a ten year old  
whose mother stands at the side,telling off her four year old son  
for standing too close to a dog sat watching the clouds float by.

And I’ll keep searching this town  
and every single scrap of truth in its reputation  
until find it redeemable enough to leave behind as my home town.  
And I’ll spend countless hours walking the same route  
through a town I’ve always lived in  
until I find something in it good enough  
to use as a reflection of who I am,  
until I can justify to myself that the place that built Gulliver  
isn’t this.


End file.
